Bartimaeus

Windows 95 (1995): Good Windows 98 (1998): Bad? Windows Me (2000): Bad Windows XP (2001): Good Windows Vista (2007): Bad Windows 7 (2009): Good Windows 8 (2012): Bad Windows 10 (2015): Bad? Windows 11 (2021): Good?

I literally nearly made that exact joke, as I originally was going to have "...maybe something I'll have to remedy next year, " at the end of that post instead, but I thought better of it, .

IIRC (because I categorically refuse to play the EEs and will only play on the original engine), SCS hijacks the difficulty menu in the EE games and you can use a preset to get close to what you want out of the mod while using the fine-tuning thingy to correct whatever small points of interest you want. The actual Stratagems installer puts its components into a few different categories, and it sounds like you would be best off ignoring the "tactical challenges" category of components and only installing the "AI enhancement" components.

You never know when they'll strike! @Halloween: Had approximately 400 kids come by. Live in a very small town, but the particular street I am happens to be where most of the Halloween action goes down, so kinda get caught in the crossfire because of it. Was shocked to see a number of kids in some anime-related costumes, including a few girls in Sailor Moon outfits - again, small and rural town, so that was a little unusual to me. There must be some closet weeaboos around here somewhere... My own nieces went as Mario & Luigi (don't @ me, they adore those silly plumbers, my youngest niece is always telling people she wants to be a plumber when she grows up...and/or a princess, and yes, I really do mean she's said she wanted to be a "princess plumber" before), and we saw another couple of kids that also went as them, plus a couple of Bowsers and a Peach as well. Sadly, my own favorite Mario character, Princess Daisy, was utterly unrepresented as always...what a scam, .

Bears are dead, Lions are beyond dead, Vikings are all but dead for winning the division - the only thing holding that back is the fact that they and the Packers haven't played each other yet. While I would expect the Packers to win both games at this point, I wouldn't guarantee it, not between those two teams (Zimmer's always been the best in the division at beating the Packers, and the LaFleur Packers are 13-1 in the division...with the only loss being @Packers to the Vikings last year - hard to lose the division when you never lose your divisional games!). As for the Cowboys...yeah, that division is super dead, and you've beat the Eagles and Giants already, and I don't see much reason to expect Washington to have a chance in either games. And so...all that matters is the #1 seed. The Cardinals were the greatest obstacle to the Packers in getting it and I had already thought it lost between the short week, our injuries, and playing @ there, but having beat them, I now believe the Packers can find a way beat anybody. Buccaneers just lost to the Saints somehow, but they legitimately only have one decent opponent left in the Bills for the rest of the season. Really, their schedule is a joke - them losing to the Saints was super important for anybody else to be able to claim the #1 seed, I think. Cardinals have a decent slate of opponents left, including the Rams, week 18 Seahawks (Wilson will probably be back), @49ers, and most pertinent to you, @Cowboys. Rams have @Packers, vs. Titans, @Cardinals, vs. Seahawks (week 15), @Ravens, 2x49ers, @Vikings. That is quite the remaining schedule - pretty much impossible for them to win all those. Cowboys have @Chiefs, vs. Raiders, vs. Cardinals for their remaining "difficult" games. Packers have @Chiefs, 2xVikings, vs. Rams, @Ravens for their remaining "difficult" games. Obviously, any team can drop any game any week - that's the nature of the NFL. But if I had to favor a team getting the #1 seed, I think I like the Buccaneers followed by the Cowboys best, especially because I think the Buccaneers are probably the most complete team (bizarrely bad defensive performance against the Saints notwithstanding), while I think the Cowboys are very likely to inexplicably drop one game to a bad team at some point in addition to likely losing at least a couple of their remaining "difficult" games...as well as having the losing head-to-head against the Buccaneers. After that, I'd probably tie Cardinals and Packers for next most likely, and then Rams the last - owing to their ridiculous remaining schedule.

Yeah, all signs point to him not playing.

Pretty sure you're good, . Can't imagine there's much of an audience in here for a strange magical girl shoujo-seinen fusion...

If you're forcing yourself to watch a show that you don't care for/actively dislike, I can see the weekly episode format being a great help for getting through it. I think I have that ranked as my third favorite Miyazaki film, after Totoro and Howl's Moving Castle (even though the latter has some very big flaws)...and maaaybe Nausicaa - they're pretty close.

Galaxy Express 999, episode 2. We're onto Mars now...which was only semi-successfully terraformed into what's basically a perpetual sandstorm in the wild west - i.e. a hellhole, but a hellhole that's technically inhabitable. Our main character, Tetsuro, decides to check out the local scene and nearly gets murdered by two local lovers for his train pass who want to get off of Mars. He manages to survive thanks to some timely advice of a kindly old barkeep and does the (self-defense) homiciding himself, and gets out of dodge. Alright. It's not particularly grabbing me and it's pretty old-fashioned, but it's O.K. I suppose - undoubtedly much better than something like Lady Asuka anyhow. All the young women characters (three so far) look so close to being exactly the same that it's kind of throwing me for a loop...and then the guy that tried to kill the MC looked bizarrely like Crusher Joe that that also threw me for a loop. Sakura stuff: (e): Samurai Champloo, episode 5. Good lord, poor Fuu can't catch a break...and I still don't know the names of the other two main characters. I *think* the crazy one is Gin, but I still can't figure out the other's. This was probably the weakest episode so far, and it was still pretty decent. (e): Lmao, the other one's name is Jin. Yeah, that about figures. (e): Episode 6... Fun episode, but...not what I expected.

This Packers team has reached new levels of scrappiness that I did not know were possible.

Seeing them is awesome. Having yourself, your home, all your worldly possessions, your livelihood, your family, and a good deal of your friends all possibly being directly in their path is not so awesome, and you kind of lose your appreciation of their beauty and awesome power when you're mentally, emotionally, and physically preoccupied with those precise risks in actual real situations. I'm personally more about the rain and lightning than the tornadoes.

Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily mind "random" events occurring if they take us somewhere interesting (all sorts of mundane as well as strange events in own lives occur randomly all the time with little to no reason to discern why they happened, after all - most things don't need an explanation beyond "it just happened" so long as they don't raise major logic or suspension of disbelief questions...and assuming they aren't horridly boring), but I definitely do not want my characters feeling like they're behaving and doing things randomly, and Ponyo frustrated me for exactly that reason. When I feel like I don't understand the characters in a work, I usually feel like I don't understand anything at all, and that is an unpleasant feeling.

Terranigma is good, but the English translation leaves a bit to be desired. Still, I enjoyed it. Secret of Mana....the English translation is outright terrible I think like 99% of the time and the gameplay, setting, story, or characters really weren't able to grab me at all*, especially since I had just played all of the MOTHER/EarthBound games right before for the first time, and it didn't really even hold a candle to them in my opinion. I do like the music of SoM, though. *I am biased against most types of fantasy, though - any kind of fantasy where characters are wearing insane and ridiculous clothing and hair styles, I'm probably using the exit door immediately. Yeah, I'm the opposite: if it wasn't for the fact that I played it as a KEED, I would not have been able to tolerate it. Random encounters stink...at the very least like EarthBound makes it so they're not so random, so you can see them as you approach enemies, which is so much better...and MOTHER did enough other things right that I could forgive it (plus, it was on the NES where having moving enemy sprites would've been taxing on the hardware - probably!). Speaking of EarthBound/MOTHER, Amentep just mentioned it too...and I should eventually, one day, give Chrono Trigger another try. It'll happen someday... Sakura:

I've watched Ponyo twice, the first time by myself and the second with my nieces. Didn't care for it the first time, actually really disliked it on the second. Really strange characters that would just do things for no apparent rhyme or reason, and the incredibly bizarre mom that was total pants on/in the head was especially the object of my ire. She was constantly switching between like four very contrary different states: 1. very sweet, 2. unreasonably aggressive, 3. helicopter mom, 4. accepting everything that was happening without question, no matter how insane it was. So many times during it I asked myself "what the hell is wrong with this mom?". So combine that with the entire tone and style of the movie seeming decidedly more aimed at only children than his other works, I would consider it easily the worst Hayao Miyazaki film. ...But it's still not as bad as most of Yoneyabashi's and Goro's Ghibli stuff, so there is that. I have a friend that said Ponyo was so bad they never tried a single other Ghibli film released after it, which I thought was a pretty extreme reaction, especially considering this is the same person who had their life changed by Princess Mononoke. While there is a bit of a fall-off after Ponyo for Ghibli, they should've at least tried The Wind Rises and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. @majestic If you love literally endless random encounters that make it so you can take anywhere between pretty literally 1 and maybe 20 steps before running into another, you'll love Quest 64. Let's just say that the game is much improved by Cheat Engine's speedhack, which I used liberally when I replayed it. ...I still own it along with an actual working N64, mind you, but I never play on actual consoles if I can avoid it for a plethora of reasons. Samurai Champloo: It really does seem quite good, though obviously there will be an issue of personal appeal. Tomoyo: Yeah, I felt bad realizing that Meiling had replaced her at some point as my favorite character, but it is something that happened. Between her crazy expressions, emotions, body language, voice-acting...and her tragedy and actual character development (which is probably the biggest contrast to Tomoyo, who has stayed static except in perhaps some very small ways in contrast), she's just such a fun and good character. Tomoyo was awesome in a way that felt totally right for her in this episode too, which I was thankful for because she's been a little too...meta and meme-ish without enough to balance it out in this final arc, I think. Yeah...she sat there with that sad, knowing smile. She knows all too well, Meiling...

I know that power efficiency doesn't really matter that much on an individual PC level, but for some reason, I just can't treat something that has literally approaching to twice the power draw for a mere 5-10% better performance very seriously.

The thing I'm most curious to see is their power efficiency, given Intel's incredible struggles with it since AMD's Zen forced them to go higher and higher just to keep up performance-wise. The fact that they're going with a hybrid core architecture that's split between "power" and "efficient" cores does not exactly inspire confidence in me here.

I'm probably even worse - I played through Fallout 3 exactly once around the time it came out and thought it was okay, I guess - it was at least a novelty after having played Oblivion; then I got New Vegas a couple of years after it came out, played a handful of hours before realizing that I was pretty sure that I didn't ever want to play a Bethesda-style open world RPG ever again in my life. True to my word, I haven't. (e): It also occurs to me that I basically haven't played any Obsidian games - NWN2 is the only one. Put twenty hours into trying to force myself to play Pillars of Eternity and not enjoying a moment of it...and a handful of hours into New Vegas. I have not even tried any other Obsidian games...and I'm not too much of a gamer anymore, so that probably won't change.

That doesn't seem like a wise idea - wanting to play Quest 64, that is. I mean, I went back and played through it again some years back and enjoyed it enough, but I played it as a child and therefore I am extremely biased and my enjoyment was mainly as a result of some twisted sense of nostalgia. The N64 is not exactly known for its good JRPGs... Samurai Champloo, episodes 3 and 4 (not really spoiler-y): Suddenly, everyone goes their separate ways because the boys can't handle any more of Fuu's nagging, especially given that there's no reason for them to be bound to her anyways...but things don't exactly go according to plan, even with the complete lack thereof. I don't know, the more I watch this, the more it just seems like a good show on pretty much all fronts. Some humor, some tension, I think I like all the main characters (though they're all VERY different from each other, and one of them is kind of a piece of crap but in a way that feels like it works and isn't annoying), the writing is good, it's not overly action-y, framing and direction and style all seems good to me (even with some of the darker ideas on display here)...and I'm even starting to vibe with the music a little. It's all just kind of working together pretty well, really - unless the show goes really off the rails in a large and bad way at some point, there's no reason I can see that I wouldn't finish this. Sakura, episode 60, THE PRODIGAL MEILING RETURNS!!! It feels like I've been waiting my entire life for this - I don't know when exactly Meiling became my favorite character, but it is a thing that happened at some point before her disappearance. Between this, Samurai Champloo, and the short Adventure Time movie, it was a good day for television. It was nice after being in a funk the past couple weeks.

Adventure Time - Together Again (2021). I hadn't been terribly fond of the two other short movies they did before this (BMO and Obsidian), probably because they're very different from the original show and felt like they were trying to do too much in too short of a time in a different kind of style, but this one focused purely on Finn and Jake, and I actually really enjoyed it - reminded me of the best parts of the original show. It was a nice send-off to the series on the subject of death and brotherly love...except apparently they're going to make a fourth one that sounds totally dumb, but I'm going to pretend that this was the final one that came out, even if it's not.

Sakura, episode 59, The Swimming Monastery. That's not actually the title of the episode, but there's an end-game series of areas in an old not very good JRPG called Quest 64 that I played as a kid called that where the layout of doors is a nonsensical maze connecting in ways that don't make any sense (and can change), and that's basically this episode. That intro was cancer, but the idea of this did make me laugh.

I need to re-watch Castle in the Sky in Japanese at some point, because it's one of the weakest English dubs for Ghibli, and I remember it kind of impacting the film, particularly the main character. @majestic Can't help but notice that you didn't recommend it to me. How incredibly odd.

Ye gods, this show sounds like death. Why is this even labeled as a shoujo? At least you know the entire show is unlikely to be pure DRAMA ZONE, unlike so much other crap that starts out like that... Courtesy of me listening to Mr. "I'm Always Right"...what a dirty rotten stinking deal that was, . I got nothing. Yeah, I like it better as a companion to TEoE a lot more now, which I didn't really expect. They offer some similar ideas and elements, but also a lot different ones as well. I wonder if someone would take the NGE ending better if they watched TEoE first instead of the other way around. I try not to re-adjust my ratings too much over time, but it does happen - the "newness" of watching something can sometimes make you react more strongly to it (both positively OR negatively) than considering something you watched weeks or even months ago. I usually like to re-consider stuff like a month after I finish watching it in order to really complete and set in stone how I feel about it. Some stuff benefits from that (e.g. Miyu, which still occupies some of my brainspace even now), some stuff can suffer...sometimes severely. NGE really made me reflect upon Nadia and how frustrating that show was even without the horrid filler, and I realized that for a show that did not really have any themes, characters, or ideas that deeply appealed to me, it just had no business being as high as I initially thought of it. It's a show that I will remember...not entirely, but more for the bad times instead of the good, unfortunately.

Here it is, finally...Neon Genesis Evangelion, the original Human Instrumentality:

(Y/N) If you could go back to when you were considering the show, would you tell past you to watch Nanoha?

Yeah, I've got that bookmarked too. I did a whole search through Madhouse's catalogue a while back and picked out the ones I liked the look/sound of.